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Tuesday, 24 March 2009

Veljko Popovic "She Who Measures"

She Who Measures (2008) by Croatian Veljko Popovic will make you think. On a surreal landscape, akin to a grey Sahara moonscape, a line of identical men and identical women march in procession pushing their shopping trolleys. Occasionally the detritus of the shopping expeditions slips between the grids of the carts littering the terrain with coloured bits and pieces that are sometimes retrieved by their owners, sometimes discarded. One man seems free of the confines, free of the mask each wears. His attempt to dissuade his fellows from follow my leader is rebuffed however. Their master is a giant, rotund clown who replaces a temporarily loosened perpetual smile mask from one of the women allowing unfettered access to the non-stop feed of trivia being broadcast to the slaves of the trolley: “More pounds for your buck.” Back at base in a vast cavern our man surveys the line of shoppers before plunging down down down, ironically to swim upwards towards a small tear in the fabric of the roof from which light intrudes. The inhabitants are seen as heads in a series of containers, filled with liquids and pumped full of life. It is a bleak commentary on life, the more so in that it is accurate in some respects with mankind in limbo, slaves to a diet of trivia. The short is visually striking for its zombie figures and unworldly landscape, all the more so given a soundtrack that is like every junk radio show or junk ad looped to obscure thought. A graduate in 2003 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and presently Assistant Professor at the Arts Academy in Split, Croatia, Veljko is a co-founder of Lemonade3d, a studio with some impressive 3D work on view.